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Maximum Business Impact: Punjab National Bank-Enterprise Mgmt System
Sunday, June 17, 2007
The scale of Punjab National Bank's Enterprise Management System (EMS)
project can be gauged from the fact thatthe bank has 3,408 branches across the
nation (some of them at the remotest of locations), out of which 2,500 branches
are up with the Core Banking System.The bank cannot afford to let any of the
links to these stations go down for long, as this would affect the working of
the centralized banking solution. The purview of the project includes routers,
switches, servers, databases, mail applications and desktops.
For example, if one of the routers gets faulty and the link goes down, the
EMS locates the problem in virtually no time, triggers alerts and you can even
repair it remotely.
PNB's CA Unicenter EMS has eight modules. These are as follows.
Network System Management: This monitors WAN links and provides
traffic/percentage utilization statistics. PNB has a four-tier full meshed
network architecture wherein the branches/offices are connected to a NC (Network
Center). These NCs are further connected to a ZNC (Zonal Networking Center),
which is connected to the DC (datacenter) at Delhi and the DRS (Disaster
Recovery Site) at Mumbai. Further, the DC and the DRS are connected through 27
Mbps fat pipe from different service providers.
The branches/offices, NCs and ZNCs are connected with a lease line as primary
link and ISDN
dial-up as backup link. The branches generally use 64 Kbps bandwidth, NCs use
bandwidth in multiples of 64 Kbps up to 2
Mbps, while and ZNCs use 2 Mbps
bandwidth.
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Mr Sidhu is a gold medalist in B Com and MA (Economics). He is also a CAIIB
from IIB and PG Diploma in Management from National Institute of Bank
Management, Pune. He is associated with various governing bodies like SIDBI
investment committee of SME Growth fund, Committee on IT and Business
Process Re-engineering, Inter-ministry Task force on Investment, etc |
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RIS Sidhu
General Manager -IT |
Mr
Sidhu is a gold medalist in B Com and MA (Economics). He is also a CAIIB
from IIB and PG Diploma in Management from National Institute of Bank
Management, Pune. He is associated with various governing bodies like SIDBI
investment committee of SME Growth fund, Committee on IT and Business
Process Re-engineering, Inter-ministry Task force on Investment, etc |
Service Level Management: This monitors and reports SLA data gathered from
different NC and branch devices. Administrators can define metrics to be
measured, measure on such metrics, and do comprehensive monitoring.
Server Management: This module monitors and manages servers
for CPU, disk, memory and I/O
utilization.
The Database Management module is to monitor and manage the database server.
| Project Specs |
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Business Problem: It was becoming difficult to monitor and manage PNB's
huge setup. The bank also wanted to improve uptime, so as to impart better
services to customers
IT Solution: Recruiting specialized
IT manpower at each of the locations would not have been the best of
available solutions. This solution offered them centralized viewing of all
IT
resources and an opportunity to
control and mend them
Impact: More than 99.5% uptime,
enhanced consumer satisfaction
Implementation partner: CMC, CA, HCL
Infosystems |
Help Desk Management: This module provides web-based
support to end users and helpdesk staff to open service requests and track
problems. It manages
requests, changes, knowledge and problems to be able to provide
support quickly.
Desktop Management: This
includes Asset Management, Software Delivery and Remote Control for Windows
desktops.
Web Server Management: This module monitors CPU, disk, and memory utilization of
Web servers. It also monitors critical services. Since the bank provides
services like Internet banking, manages additional delivery channels such as
ATMs and Kiosks, is a member of various electronic payment and
settlement systems like INFINET, SWIFT, RTGS, SFMS and EFT, and has 39
branches/offices enabled with videoconferencing facility, this module becomes of
utmost
importance.
MS Exchange Management: This module monitors and manages mail traffic. It also
takes care of user quotas and disk space utilization.
Integrating such a mammoth
infrastructure and taking it to small and remote locations was a daunting task.
However, with the competent core team, vendors and consultants, PNB overcame the
challenge successfully. Talking of the effectiveness of the implementation, the
bank told us that after this implementation their process turnaround time to
address any
failure/problem of the link or
infrastructure has come down by
60 percent.
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